I had a few friends of mine that are much further progressed than us look at some of our logs to give any recommendations they seen that could help us improve as we move forward. One of them has spent a lot of time tanking between a warrior and a pally and I figured I should share with you the tips he pointed out to me:

Using those cooldowns listed will help reduce damage taken by a lot throughout the raids and help the healers focus on other areas of the raid that need the extra healing.

I've found a few things I can do better and a few other tips for others that should help out as a whole.

Now I'm all for improving, but I'm unsure of exactly when I should be using those cooldowns instead of timing ShotR slams. Sure, I get that if there's a massive damage hit coming up, or we're taking a stretched period of sustained high damage (Megaera towards the end when the heads start really hurting)I should be popping them. I don't feel that I'm taking that much damage. I don't believe in using cooldowns just because it's there (unless I'm dpsing). Maybe I'm wrong.

Well, for one, GoAK will not show up on WoL when you're tanking, it's a bug that's been around for quite some time.

As far as CD usage...I just use DP pretty openly every 40-50 seconds during what is known to be a big damage spike, even with having SoTR up. As far as AD, it's more of a situational thing and now that I think about it, I rarely use it.

GoAK usage, is there for movements or when I know I a healer isn't immediately around me.

My 3 minutes are pretty situational especially on progression fights. I have the thought process that I would rather not waste a 3 min on something sort of trivial and then need it a minute later on something that's majorly threatening.

As the tier progresses, you'll pretty much get in the habit of either A. using them at the same point each fight, or B. just not using them period as you're expecting the dmg as is your healers.

I usually chain my cooldowns towards the end of a fight, because, why not? For Megaera breaths, I'll use DP and then AD for the 5th head, and DP and then GoAK for the 6th head. If the 6th head still takes a long time to kill, you might want to save AD for that. A lot of other fights have a burn phase towards the end, and then you might as well use them.

If you're doing normal, and you know how to time your SotRs, then you shouldn't be needing them much, if at all.

What is the problem in the raids, though? Do you wipe often because you fall dead, then naturally, you need to use them more often. Do you wipe often because DPS doesn't hit berserk timers, then naturally, it doesn't matter much. Do you wipe often because healers go oom towards the end of fights, then it might be useful to pop them more often, or talk with your healers, and tell them you got things under control. Inexperienced healers that see you drop low after a breath might have the instinct to burst heal you back to full, using mana-heavy heals. If you got things under control by stacking 5 HoPo and chaining SotR after the breath, then you need to tell them they don't need to burst you up.

If he really insists on you using AD more often, just abuse it for kill abilities for extra vengeance

Thels wrote:What is the problem in the raids, though? Do you wipe often because you fall dead, then naturally, you need to use them more often. Do you wipe often because DPS doesn't hit berserk timers, then naturally, it doesn't matter much. Do you wipe often because healers go oom towards the end of fights, then it might be useful to pop them more often, or talk with your healers, and tell them you got things under control.

No no no, none of that. We've gotten to Lei Shen (new raid group, started 4 weeks ago approximately) consistently, but sometimes there's hiccups. Dark Animus there were a series of wipes with the tanks at the start, even though we were blowing cooldowns. I don't know, maybe he's just trying to extract the last ounce of preventable damage or frustrated that we blew through 11/12 but are having problems with Shen.